On Monday at the International Aviation Forecast Summit in Olympic Valley, California, Cush said he does not expect Alaska to make any decisions until after the merger closes, expected in the last three months of the year. Until then, Alaska has limited access to information about Virgin America’s finances and strategy.

“They have some tough decisions to make about the brand and the product,” Cush said. “Those really aren’t decisions they can make until they are inside and have access to data.”

Cush said the merger is still on schedule to close in the fourth quarter, after which point Cush will leave the company. The U.S. Department of Justice must clear the merger. Cush said the two carriers have “a number of weeks to go,” before they’re one company.

“Everything is going according to plan,” Cush said. “There have been no bumps on the road.”

Future of Virgin America’s Products

There is at least one element of Virgin America’s product that Alaska may not retain. Virgin America allows passengers to place food orders on in-seat screens, and meals and snacks are delivered by flight attendants. Alaska does not have in-seat screens, so that would make it a difficult service element for it to adopt. But there’s another challenge: Most airline union contracts limit how flight attendants can serve passengers.

“It is as much a labor issue as a technology issue,” Cush said. “It is a change in the work rules and therefore it becomes a union issue.”

Alaska must also decide what to do with Virgin America’s trans-continental business class cabin, particularly on aircraft flying from San Francisco and Los Angeles to New York JFK and Newark. Cush acknowledged his airline’s eight-seat business class cabin, which lacks lie-flat beds, is not necessarily competitive with flat-beds offered American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, or JetBlue Airways. This is an issue, as Cush said those flights accounts for roughly 40 percent of Virgin America’s revenue.

Cush said Virgin America decided not to install flat-beds because it calculated it would cost too much while generating little extra revenue. The airline would have had to remove a row of coach seats, at the same time business class fares in the markets were falling.

“I don’t know how that math works,” Cush said. “The ‘transcon’ market is a bit of a wasteland compared to where it was before.”

For now, Virgin America is still selling its recliner seats for roughly the same prices as other airlines charge for flatbeds, and Cush said carrier is mostly holding onto revenue. But Alaska may decide it needs a more competitive product for its transcontinental flights.